Hostile environment

Ray Coleman and other black ex-employees accuse the Department of Natural Resources of discrimination

Former state employee Ray Coleman: I was loyal to DNR . . . . DNR was not loyal to Ray Coleman.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY R. L. NAVE

Ray Coleman makes sense as a park ranger. Tall and bewhiskered, with a powerful yet
easygoing demeanor that commands respect, the former conservation
worker bears a strong resemblance to Smokey Bear. The likeness
doesn’t stop there; like Smokey, Coleman has spent a good
part of his life fighting fires, albeit of a different kind. A Democrat and longtime participant in St.
Clair County politics, Coleman has had his share of conflicts, and
many of those conflicts stem from his seemingly dogged
determination to sabotage southeastern Illinois’ political
machine, both as a candidate and as a state employee with the
Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Coleman appears to possess all the necessary
qualities for leadership. At the very least, he’s somebody
who could win elections, which is what makes his refusal to make
nice with the local regime — even if it is, as he says, run
by good ol’ boys — so perplexing. However, his
allegiance, he says, belongs to the black community more so than
the Democratic Party, which he believes isn’t always the best
choice for African-Americans. Right now he’s pushing hard downstate,
and among blacks, for a pair of annoyances to the Democratic Party
establishment. Before she officially announced her candidacy,
Coleman pledged support to Republican state Treasurer Judy Baar
Topinka in a likely November showdown against Gov. Rod Blagojevich
in the Illinois gubernatorial race. He’s also backing Alexi
Giannoulias, the Chicago banking heir who’s looking to beat
state-party-endorsed Paul Mangieri, now Knox County state’s
attorney, for state treasurer. Meanwhile, he is in the midst of his own campaign
for Democratic central committeeman for the 12th District. It’s
an ambitious quest, considering that he’s up against a powerful
congressman, U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello. But Coleman has always been a bit of a
maverick, proud to play the gadfly role. In 2004, he supported then-state Sen. Barack
Obama over the state party’s pick, state Comptroller Dan
Hynes, for U.S. Senate. The same year, while serving as Canteen
Township clerk, Coleman backed Steve Reeb, a Republican vying with
the former Democratic mayor of Belleville, Mark Kern, in the race
for St. Clair County Board chairman. A decade earlier, Coleman supported Sue
Montalvo for county assessor over Sam Flood, an influential
Democrat who went on to serve as Blagojevich’s
government-relations director and who is now the interim director
of DNR. In 2004, Blagojevich made deep cuts in the
DNR budget, costing Coleman and 123 others their jobs. In no time,
Coleman had hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit in federal court,
naming Flood and then-DNR director Joel Brunsvold as defendants. In
his complaint, Coleman asserts that the real reason he lost his job
was his long history of not bowing to the white political
establishment. Brunsvold and Flood dispute Coleman’s
allegations, although the parties are reportedly close to reaching
a settlement. People familiar with Coleman’s political
history say that it’s hard to measure the extent to which
race played a factor. Certainly his rabble-rousing likely cost
Coleman brownie points with some whites, and probably some
African-Americans as well. So to call Coleman’s woes
comeuppance for biting the hand that fed his own political
ambitions might not be too far off base — particularly in
southern Illinois, where paying to play is as deeply entrenched as
the Sears Tower is tall. But even if Coleman had it coming,
politically speaking, other black DNR employees have echoed many of
Coleman’s claims, pointing to years of declining numbers of
African-American employees at the agency. The result, they say, is
a daily fight against a culture of discrimination at DNR that no
one who can seems willing to do anything about. Controversy has always had a way of
finding Coleman. A basketball standout at Springfield’s
Griffin High School in the late 1970s, Coleman — who moved to
the capital city from East St. Louis to live with his brother
— attended Chicago State University on a basketball
scholarship. During his senior season at CSU, Coleman
injured his knee and left the team. According to a 1982 Chicago Defender
article published after the incident, his coach said that Coleman,
though a promising athlete, walked away from the team. However,
Coleman claims that the coach kicked him off the team; he accuses
the coach of not understanding black players.After finishing up his sociology degree at
Quincy University in 1983 and working his way up to management at
the another state agency, Coleman made a lateral transfer to DNR in
1994. As the first African-American site
superintendent at Horseshoe Lake State Park, in Madison County,
Coleman says he got the vibe that some white employees had a hard
time accepting him as their boss. One secretary, he says, refused to do any of
the work he gave her. Despite the racial tension, Coleman engaged
co-workers in discussions about race, seeing it as an opportunity
to provide diversity education. After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Coleman says that a white
park worker speculated that the culprit “must have been one
of those ragheads,” referring to a Middle Easterner. “We didn’t have any Middle
Eastern employees, but I don’t like stereotypes and decided
that race shouldn’t be discussed in the workplace. I decided
we weren’t going to talk about race anymore,” Coleman
says. Later, he says, the same employee gave Coleman a
book on the Ku Klux Klan and said that if he weren’t afraid that
he’d lose his job with the state, he’d join the Klan. One day, Coleman says, he got a call from a
hospital where the man had gone to seek medical treatment. A
hospital worker on the phone told Coleman that she had a
responsibility to inform him that the man had said that he planned
to take a gun to work and shoot Coleman. So Coleman got on the horn to then-deputy
director Bruce Clay, who called the park and state police to arrest
the man. He was fired but subsequently reinstated and transferred
to a different park after a civil-service hearing. That incident, Coleman says, coupled with the
day-to-day struggle to earn the respect of his employees, caused
him to no longer enjoy going to work. “I was disappointed that to just to
provide recreational services, it had to be this
complicated,” he says. In 2003, Coleman was promoted from site
superintendent to complex manager, overseeing operations at
Horseshoe Lake, as well as Frank Holten State Park, located in St.
Clair County. In May, Coleman’s job at Horseshoe Lake was
taken over by Scott Flood, son of Sam Flood. Coleman didn’t
like the move, and he e-mailed his bosses several times about
Flood’s lack of experience and repeatedly threatened to
discipline him. In March 2004, Flood, who could not be
reached for comment, was shipped to the Washington County
Conservation Area, and Coleman was demoted to his old job running
just Horseshoe Lake. That May, Flood was promoted to regional land
manager, thus becoming Coleman’s boss.If he’d had his druthers, Coleman
— a former recipient of the DNR employee-of-the-quarter award
and Ducks Unlimited Illinois Conservationist of the Year honors
— would have retired from the agency. That now seems unlikely, and, in
Coleman’s view, Blagojevich is largely responsible because he
has allowed the problems at DNR to persist on his watch.Although most had never met before
last fall, Kimberly Conner, Kelvin Coburn, Gloria Dixon, and Trevor
Lawrence have stories that sound a lot like Coleman’s. Their employment at DNR overlapped during a
period between 2000 and 2002, and each has filed
racial-discrimination complaints with the Illinois Department of
Human Rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the
Office of Executive Inspector General (created by executive order
in 2003), or in federal court. Separately, these complaints could be
dismissed as personality conflicts with co-workers and supervisors;
together, the ex-employees say, the complaints reveal a pattern of
discrimination at DNR that has gone unchecked for a long time.East St. Louis native Dixon, who declined an
interview with Illinois Times, says in her lawsuit that she was subjected to a
“pattern of harassing, discriminatory, and retaliatory
actions” based on her age, race, and sex and the fact that
she filed an internal complaint with the agency’s EEO when
she worked at Frank Holten Park. Meanwhile, Conner and Coburn were having
issues in Champaign with their boss, Region 3 administrator Jim
Capel, who, they say, picked on African-American office workers and
treated them disrespectfully. “He was an ass,” Conner says,
“but blacks caught the brunt of it.” Co-workers say that Coburn was constantly at
odds with Capel, who also did not return a call seeking comment.
Coburn admits that he sometimes purposely antagonized Capel. In his June 2003 complaint to the Illinois
Human Rights Commission, Coburn writes: “I have been subjected to harassment
and racial bias by the regional land manager on a continuous basis.
All of my actions within the workplace are closely scrutinized more
so than that similarly situated non-black co-workers. I have
complained about the ‘negative and discriminatory
actions’ to management repeatedly to no avail.” Moreover, Coburn says, he was denied
promotion and a white woman with less experience was promoted
instead. On the surface, some of Coburn’s beefs seem petty.
In 2001, Capel denied Coburn’s secondary-employment
application — which state employees must submit if they work
at a part-time job or have a private enterprise — to deejay
on weekends at a Champaign hip-hop club. “It seems after some of the
nights Mr. Coburn works, he comes in late or calls in sick,”
Capel wrote on the form. However, Coburn says, there was no way for
Capel, a middle-aged white man, to know what nights he worked at
the all-black club. This, he says, is just one example of
Capel’s singling him out. But it was the piling on of a
number of minor incidents, Coburn says, that drove him to filing
his EEOC complaint and eventually a lawsuit. Coburn now
acknowledges that sometimes he did come to work a few minutes
late. “Every morning, I had to come up with a
reason to go into that office,” Coburn says, “and,
yeah, sometimes it took few extra minutes to find that
reason.” But whereas Coburn, a lanky Gulf War veteran,
was more outwardly combative, co-worker Conner was less noisily
defiant of their supervisor. From 1999 to 2003, she kept a log of
her run-ins with Capel, documenting what she believes was racial
and sexual discrimination. Like Coburn, the culmination of several
seemingly trivial occurrences, is what pushed her over the edge.
Once, according to her complaint filed with the EEOC, she caught
Capel looking down the front of her blouse, which she reported
immediately. Another time, Conner says, Capel consulted white
workers about preparations for the office holiday party and shut
blacks out of the process. While Conner was finishing her
bachelor’s degree at Eastern Illinois University, Capel
denied her tuition reimbursement on the grounds that the classes
were not related to the job she did at DNR. “Racial discrimination has been an
ongoing problem,” Conner writes in her log in August 2002.
“African-American personnel have been forced to endure the
detrimental effect of racial discrimination, the creation of an
unhealthy work environment and undue stress. I, frankly, should not
be forced to endure what I perceive as racial bias in its rawest
form.”Conner was issued a right-to-sue letter five
days after filing her complaint with the EEOC, giving her 90 days
to file a lawsuit against the agency, which she did in February of
2003. Her two-part complaint includes a charge that she was denied several
promotions because of her race. In nine years spent working at DNR,
Conner, who eventually finished her bachelor’s degree, never
received a promotion in eight tries. “I don’t know if I was naïve
or what, but I didn’t expect to be treated like that,”
she says. Trevor Lawrence, of Springfield, didn’t
expect what he got, either. In September 2003, after two years as an
intern with hopes of becoming an DNR public-information officer,
Lawrence received a letter from human-resources director Michele
Cusumano saying that the department determined it wasn’t in
its “best interest” to promote him. He’d been
fired. In his final performance evaluation, Lawrence
scored “acceptable” in seven of eight categories and
“accomplished” in one. He promptly filed a complaint
with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, claiming that because
the agency couldn’t cite poor work performance as the reason
for his dismissal, race must have been a factor. Lawrence and his attorney declined comment
for this story. However, in July, IDHR did find that five of
Lawrence’s comparatives — all them nonblack —
were hired and promoted to their target positions within one year
and entered a finding of “substantial evidence” that
discrimination had, in fact, occurred. Although DNR, which currently
employs about 1,300 people and oversees state parks and lakes,
collects no specific demographic information from customers, white
men represent the majority of the agency’s employees. According to agency-workforce reports, which
each state agency must file yearly with the Secretary of
State’s Index Department, 76 percent of its workers are white
men. On top of that, analysis of these reports
since 2000 shows that although total minority-employment rates have
held steady, African-American numbers have decreased steadily. Of
1,779 workers employed by DNR in 2000, 73 were minorities,
representing 4 percent of the agency’s total workforce. In 2005, that number was about the same.
African-American representation, however, slipped from 3 percent to
2 percent from 2000 to 2005. On the surface, this dip appears
negligible, but the number of African-American DNR workers fell
from 59 to 30 during this period, with most employees of color
working at the agency’s Springfield headquarters. In addition to its offices in Springfield and
Chicago, DNR has five regional offices, located in Sterling,
Bartlett, Clinton, Alton, and Benton. The paucity of
African-American staff there is what exacerbates the culture of
racial insensitivity at DNR, former employees say. But no one expects that DNR will ever see an
onslaught of minority applicants. “How many black deer hunters are
there?” Coburn asks. “A brother is not going to apply
to go work in the woods nowhere.” Moreover, in 2003 the agency moved its Region
3 headquarters from Champaign County, whose population is more than
20 percent minority, to Clinton in DeWitt County, which is 97.8
percent white, according to the latest Census Bureau data. “There is a culture of not embracing
minorities or putting them into top-level positions,” says
Janette Peak, who worked as a human-resources manager for DNR for
more than a decade. For a time, Peak was also in charge of minority
recruiting. “We would pass along
résumés of who we thought were qualified minorities,
but action was rarely taken,” Peak says. Peak, now working in the private sector, says
that during her tenure, minorities were sometimes passed over for
promotion in favor of less qualified whites but that this would be
hard to prove, nonetheless, because of how the hiring process
works. The interviewer, she says, might have a heads-up on who is
“supposed” to get the job, direction that could come
from anywhere, such as the director or governor’s office. Minorities in the agency hoped that things
would get better when liberal Blagojevich took office in 2002, but
Peak says that neither minority hiring nor the culture improved.
The minority-recruitment position was eventually eliminated during
a round of budget cuts. “Our hope became disappointment,”
Peak says. The rationale given by agency brass, she
says, was that they couldn’t find minorities with
bachelor’s degrees in areas such as botany. But Peak pointed
out that minorities abound in the business and engineering fields,
both for which DNR hires. In October 2005, she says, after listening to
the experiences of other black employees and coming to the
realization herself that there was no place for her to advance in
DNR, even with her education and 11 years of experience in human
resources, she decided to leave the agency. Though she can’t say with
certainty that she would have reached her goal of becoming a top
human-resources administrator at DNR, Peak does believe that if she
were white she would have been given more serious consideration. Peak and other black DNR employees
believe that racial tension would be diminished if there were more
minorities on the agency’s executive staff, even if numbers
didn’t improve. One of the last was former African-American
deputy director Bruce Clay, who retired seven years ago and lives
in Springfield. Those who worked under Clay say that the
climate was different when he was there because Clay was fair and
resolved conflicts quickly. “I wouldn’t tolerate
[discrimination]; neither would director Brent Manning — Gov.
[Jim] Edgar wouldn’t have tolerated it,” Clay says. “You have to have backing from the top
that things like that won’t happen. I set the precedent, and
it starts with the governor’s office and trickles
down.”DNR, he says, will likely never be up to
standards on minority hiring because African-Americans aren’t
going to want to move someplace like Anna-Jonesboro, in southern
Illinois, and human-resources officials don’t want to put
them in unsafe situations. He goes on: “Ray Coleman was a good
site super, let me tell ya. Why wouldn’t you have a minority
run the park when the community is 80 percent minority?” Coleman says he began hearing that black DNR
employees around the state were finding themselves in similar
situations. With Peak’s help, he and Conner started an
informal support group for black DNR employees last year. Coleman had previously worked with Dixon and,
because he traveled to Springfield often, was familiar with
Lawrence’s case as well. Meanwhile, Conner and Coburn worked
together in Champaign. “We knew it was racial,” Coleman
says, “but proving it is a different story.” In September, they came together for the
first time to swap stories in the offices of the Illinois
Association of Minorities in Government, a worker-advocacy group
based in Springfield. “Trevor’s case bothered blacks
and whites at the agency because he was well liked,” says Roy
Williams, the current executive director of IAMG and a former DNR
employee. Williams is all too familiar with the
experiences of black employees at DNR. As a DNR legislative liaison
from spring 2003 to December 2004, he says black employees often
came to him to air their grievances, albeit unofficially. Because
little was being done, Williams says, he took up the causes of some
minority workers. “Constantly we were told that decisions
were made by the governor’s office, but what does that
mean?” Williams asks. “That’s a hard thing to
fight when you don’t have the name of the person who’s
making these decisions. They should be able to explain who made the
decisions and why.”DNR communications director Chris
McCloud says that the agency has been working especially hard in
the past month to address the issues raised by Coleman and other
former workers. “DNR should reflect the diversity of the
state, and we are working to ensure that it does,” he says. DNR has an affirmative-action plan in place,
but McCloud acknowledges that still more needs to be done to
increase diversity. “The perception problem may be the
result of an ineffective recruitment strategy, given the challenges
to increasing the number of minorities at DNR,” he says. The agency faces certain realities —
two successive years of downsizing, the number of unique positions
requiring highly specialized training, and the location of jobs in
outlying areas where the parks are but few minorities live —
that, McCloud admits, pose challenges to recruiting minorities to
DNR’s ranks. “Because of these challenges, DNR is
committed to being more proactive, strategic and aggressive in
order to boost minority recruitment,” McCloud says. Earlier this month, DNR hired Marvin Sprague
as its first permanent equal-employment officer in more than a
year. Sprague, who has worked in state government for more than 26
years and had planned to retire this month, says that he was
recruited personally by Flood to the fill the post. Flood, Sprague says, alerted him to the
problems at DNR, and he agreed to sign on for at least the next two
years to work on improving the climate. Sprague, former head of Quincy’s Negro
Advancement Association (not to be confused the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People), will also serve
in Peak’s former capacity as minority recruiter. Already
he’s met with IAMG’s Williams, and he’s
scheduling meetings with other equal-employment organizations, such
as the NAACP and Urban League. In dealing with problems in the past, Sprague
says, DNR was reactive. “We’re going to try to be more
proactive,” he says. “That’s the key to
success.” Similarly, a representative for the
governor’s office insists that that office is trying to be
more inclusive. “Overall, Gov. Blagojevich is committed to a
diverse state government demonstrated by the hires he’s in
particular control of,” Rebecca Rausch, a spokeswoman for the
governor, said in an e-mailed statement.She points to 18 minorities Blagojevich has
appointed to his cabinet. The governor, Rausch notes, has also made a
“number of historic appointments of minorities to his top
staff.” They include deputy chief of staff Esther Lopez, a
Latina, as well as Cheryle Jackson and Louanner Peters, deputy
chiefs of staff for communications and social services,
respectively, both of whom are African-American women. Civil-rights lawyers say that
proving race discrimination in court can be tough because all a
defendant has to do is show that the cause for an adverse
employment condition (i.e. nonpromotion or termination) could have
been something other than race. Or the defendant can just flat outlast
— and outspend — an accuser. Of the five DNR
discrimination complaints, just two remain viable. In September, a judge dismissed Dixon’s
discrimination charge but granted her motion for summary judgment
with respect to her retaliation claim. In January, the defendants
in Dixon’s suit moved for judgment as a matter of law,
meaning that Dixon has failed to sufficiently show that any
retaliation occurred as a result of her discrimination complaint. Meanwhile, Dixon, now retired, and Conner
have appealed their cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December,
they received notices saying that their cases had been docketed.
However, it appears unlikely that the high court will hear either
of them. Conner opted to move to Springfield in 2003
rather than commute to Clinton Lake, where, she says, she felt
unsafe as a black woman. In December, Conner left DNR, making a
lateral transfer to a different state agency. Coburn, who also moved from Champaign to
Springfield in 2003 to work at another state agency, missed a
deadline in his federal court case, killing his lawsuit. Now making
more money, Coburn says that he is satisfied to simply put DNR
behind him and move forward with his life. As he awaits the outcome of months of
settlement hearings, Coleman is still trying to save the world
— and get a little piece of it for himself. He keeps himself busy with a new job and
sewing (this winter, he made a dress for his teenage
daughter’s Christmas ball) and heading up the fundraising
efforts for the local branch of a national youth-service
organization — his first steady job in more than a year. At this point, his career in politics remains
uncertain. Although some East St. Louis residents have said that
they would help elect Coleman to public office if he moves back to
“East Boogie” from Fairview Heights, someone else has
offered him help opening his own Quizno’s if he promises to
get out of politics altogether. “I’m perceived to be ‘Mr.
Controversy,’ so I can’t rest and think that I’m
going to be left alone,” Coleman says of the nonstop scrutiny
he feels. “I’ve got too many people trying to shoot me
in the back with an arrow.”Coleman’s attorney, Eric Evans, says
that they have reached a tentative agreement in Coleman’s
federal suit against Flood and Brunsvold. Evans does not put a dollar
amount on the specific damages Coleman is seeking, saying only that
the jurisdictional minimum to file suit in district court is
$75,000. However, the agreement will not be final
until the actual documents are executed — with any luck,
Evans says, by the end of the month. In backing Topinka and Giannoulias, he hopes
to see change in Springfield — both in the governor’s
mansion and at DNR — come November. “I got nothing out of this
administration — all I got was Scott Flood at Horseshoe Lake
and the streets,” Coleman says. “I was loyal to DNR under Brent Manning
and Jim Edgar, Brent Manning and George Ryan, Joel Brunsvold and
Rod Blagojevich. DNR was not loyal to Ray Coleman.”